The purpose of my Science Letter (Rahmstorf 2006)
was to draw attention to two points: First, the results of the two
models used by von Storch et al. are not "similar" as
claimed by the authors, as anyone can see from the graph in my Letter.
My second point was that "the error of simulated proxies
found in the HadCM3 model is smaller than the error margin given
by Mann et al. for their method and shown in the IPCC report."
This point is not disputed in the Response by von Storch et al.

Since they cannot claim a large bias for Mann's
proxy reconstruction any more, von Storch
et al. instead open up a new line of defense: they now claim that
the error margin reported for the Mann et al. reconstruction should
have been smaller than stated by its authors - and if it were
smaller, then the bias claimed by von Storch et al. (2004) would
still be significant. This is very subtle logic that one should
take time to savour: they claim the stated error was too large,
in order to still be able to claim that they found it was too small.
Von Storch et al. say in their Response that
the error margin of the Mann et al. 1999 reconstruction should have
been given as 0.07 ºC (2 standard deviations, on 40-year time
scales). You read correctly: less than a tenth of a degree! If the
errors were really that small, this would be a sensational success
of the reconstruction method: the error would be even smaller than
that given by the Hadley Centre for their smoothed instrumental
record for recent decades, with thousands of measurement stations.

von Storch et al. call this small error margin
an "updated uncertainty bound for the MBH98 series",
as it appears in a figure in a paper by Gerber et al. (2003). Mike
Mann, on the other hand, maintains that the original error margin
of Mann et al. 1999, shown in the IPCC report and in my Letter,
is the correct one - that is a 2-sigma error of 0.17 ºC. The
difference arises from assumptions on how "red" the proxy
errors are, i.e. how correlated the errors are for subsequent years.
The very low error margin claimed in von Storch's Response is based
on almost no correlation. I find that assumption not very credible,
and am quite surprised that von Storch et al. endorse it. First,
do they really believe that the error in the proxy reconstruction
is smaller than that of the recent instrumental record (and we are
talking about comparable types of error here, measurement accuracy
and spatial coverage)? Second, in their 2004 Science paper they
show an error margin for their pseudo-proxies of about 0.2 ºC
(their Fig. 2A), in line with Mann et al. 1999. And third, in their
recent Response to the comment by Wahl et al. (2006), von Storch
et al. (2006b) claimed that the proxy errors are highly correlated
(even much more so than real proxy data suggest, see comment
by David Ritson), as this was the only way to salvage their
conclusions after Wahl et al. exposed their error in implementing
the proxy method. They contradict themselves if they now claim the
annual errors are almost uncorrelated.

So what is the bottom line of all this? In their
recent responses to the comments by Wahl et al. (2006) and by myself,
von Storch et al. had to concede three important points:

Their ECHO-G simulation was affected by a major
artificial climate drift.

The bias of the pseudo-proxy method in HadCM3,
which they did not show in their paper, was much smaller than
that in ECHO-G, and in fact well within the error margin that
Mann claimed (and still claims) for his method.

For both models, the Mann et al. method was
implemented incorrectly by von Storch et al. (2004); with correct
implementation the bias is much smaller than claimed in that paper.

In each case, von Storch et al. argue that somehow
their mistakes don't matter. The climate drift problem supposedly
affects only the first four centuries of their run (although our
own model trials replicating their faulty initialisation procedure
suggest otherwise). The small bias suggested by HadCM3 supposedly
still lies outside the error margin of the Mann et al. method (but
only if you assume an unrealistically small error margin, based
on assuming uncorrelated annual errors). And even with correct implementation
of the Mann et al. method you can supposedly still get substantial
bias (but only if you assume highly correlated annual errors, i.e.
unrealistically red proxies).

Cutting through all this rhetoric, it becomes evident
that the positions of von Storch and colleagues and Mann and colleagues
are in fact not very far apart any more, for all practical purposes.
There is no more talk about the "hockey stick" being "nonsense"
and similar unwarranted claims by von Storch, which had brought
the issue into the media and the US Senate. A panel
of the US National Academy of Sciences has also just vindicated
the "hockey stick". The remaining debate has now come
down to rather small errors in the proxy method, of the order of
0.1 - 0.2 ºC (not a large bias of 0.7 ºC as initially
claimed by von Storch et al.) This is interesting for experts but
need not concern the general public. All political and media excitement
about this issue has in fact been in vain.